Emily Lordi Reviews D’Angelo’s Black Messiah

If you are like us, you are still digesting D’Angelo’s latest offering, Black Messiah. Recently, The Root asked Musiqology Advisory Board Member, Emily Lordi for her thoughts. She accurately presents the album as D’Angelo’s response to the community’s call that, “Black Lives Matter.”

Here is an an excerpt of her review:

The album starts with an ominous love song that recalls James Baldwin’s description of the violent love affair between black and white America. The creepy lyrics evoke a one-sided romance where “you can’t leave me, it ain’t that easy,” while the snare on the backbeat sounds like a lash. Here is the mixture of violence and desire at the heart of the black musical tradition, to which D’Angelo pays inventive homage on every track…

That this funk is born of struggle doesn’t mean you can’t dance to it, as we are daily reminded by dancers on the front lines of Black Lives Matter marches. Funk music has long wedded dance and liberation, as when Funkadelic advises us to Free Your Mind … and Your Ass Will Follow and when Janelle Monáe and Erykah Badu more recently attest that “the booty don’t lie.” Sex and love are modes of transport, not escape: Here, the acute glow of “Really Love” yields textured flight into “Another Life.”

Read the full review over at The Root.